For an artist in search of an audience, the Highway Gallery project offers an unusual opportunity.

Which is why Lily Kuonen, a Jacksonville artist and professor in Jacksonville University’s division of visual arts, sought the chance to have five of her images included in a rotation of public service announcements, Amber alerts and commercial advertising on 14 digital billboards owned by Clear Channel Outdoors.

Each time one of her five images rotates onto one of the 14 billboards, it will, like the other digital ads and announcements, be visible for eight seconds before rotating off.

“Highway Gallery: A Public Art Project” is a collaboration between Clear Channel Outdoor of Jacksonville and Florida Mining, a Jacksonville art gallery owned by artist Steve Williams, who also owns the sign company Harbinger.

“Art intersects with commerce often, though usually in ways more subtle,” Williams said.

Displaying art work on its digital billboards is part of the commitment Clear Channel Outdoor made to the city to include community-focused content on the billboards, spokesman Michael Munz said.

The project began in July when the work of 12 regional artists — Jim Benedict, Jason John, Daryl Bunn, Carole Danek, Aaron Garvey, Jason Fort, Chip Southworth, Mark George, Troy Eittreim, JAX Laridae, Jesse Erantman and Jeff Whipple — was exhibited at Florida Mining. Those works then became part of the rotation on the Clear Channel digital billboards during August. Now Kuonen’s work will go on display throughout September. Jacksonville artist Eric Gilyard will be the featured artist on the billboards in October.

The plan is to continue the Highway Gallery project indefinitely, with a new artist each month, said Cabeth Cornelius, spokeswoman for Florida Mining.

Kuonen, 28, said she initially wasn’t sure she liked the idea of her art sharing space with commercial advertisements. But then she thought about the audience she’ll be reaching when her art is visible to thousands of people as they drive by the Clear Channel billboards pleases her.

“My work encourages the participation of the viewer,” she said.

Kuonen, who earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Central Arkansas and a master’s in fine arts from the Savannah College of Art & Design, was primarily a figurative painter until about four years ago.

But she has since developed a process she calls playnting, which she describes as “the synthesis of painting with additional forms and actions.”

For example, one large playnting that someone else might call a sculpture consists of three 8-foot-by1-foot canvases to each of which a full paint can has been attached, with some of the paint dripping down the canvases. She calls that piece “Tension.” Another piece, “Stunted,” which is part of the Folio Weekly Invitational Artist Exhibition at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, consists of wood in various forms from solid to sawdust.

On her website, www.LilyKuonen.com, she explains her work process: “I work without knowing what the resolution will be. I observe as materials mingle and react. As I build and shape them, I discover just what these materials are capable of as combined structures.”

She also often repurposes them.

“For my work to stick around for six months is unusual,” she said.

For the digital billboards, she decided to create five panels with text on each, text that would convey subtle ideas. “Billboards are not subtle at all,” she said.

So one panel has the word “covered,” which is covered by paint so the letters are barely visible. Another contains the words “now” and “here,” but with the space between the “w” and the “h” narrow enough that the letters can be read as one word, “nowhere.”

Although Williams suggested she create the art digitally, she decided to make the panels and then scan them to create digital images. The five panels that rotate on the Clear Channel billboard may ultimately be part of a larger series of works, she said.

Kuonen lives in Riverside, not far from the Roselle Street warehouse where she shares a studio with ceramicist Tiffany Whitfield Leach. They’ve dubbed it the Clay & Canvas Studio.

In addition to being in the exhibit at the Cummer, she is scheduled to take eight pieces to Herman Maril Gallery at University of Maryland for an upcoming exhibit and she’ll be in the next faculty art show at JU. She and Leach also open their studio twice a year to exhibit their own and other artists’ work. And she and artist Stacy Bouche have plans for a show, “The Apartment Show,” inspired by “The Kitchen Show,” a 1991 exhibition of contemporary art that curator Hans Ulrich Obrist staged in his own kitchen while still a student.

“The Apartment Show” would look at “space and place and the rental culture,” Kuonen said.